The One Meal a Day (OMAD) diet, is a kind of diet that helps you lose weight. It’s a type of intermittent fasting, where one eats at alternating intervals throughout the day. In the OMAD diet, one doesn’t eat for the 24 hours of the day but consumes all the calories in a single meal.
The Ketogenic diet (keto ) is a low-carb diet whereby one gets fewer calories from carbohydrates and more from proteins and fats. Carbs that are easy to digest, like sugar, soda, pastries, and white bread are not consumed. This diet lowers blood sugar and insulin levels and shifts the body’s metabolism away from carbs and toward fat and ketones.
OMAD is better than keto. One meal a day gives you the liberty to eat food from any food group and doesn’t restrict you from consuming carbohydrates. This enables greater sustainability and compliance in the long term.OMAD also teaches hunger tolerance and successful results are obtained by a caloric deficit over a long time.
OMAD also allows you to consume at least 50 grams of carbs per day in one go, with this diet, you get to have a meal that makes you feel completely satisfied.
The Keto diet requires you to change your entire lifestyle routine in favor of fat loss. This diet can help you lose weight and at the same time improve your general health.
WHICH IS MORE EFFECTIVE, KETO OR INTERMITTENT FASTING?
Intermittent fasting is a dietary approach to inducing or speeding up ketosis, and it involves having short-term fasts at stipulated regular intervals. This method of fasting has been one of the most trusted and used weight loss solutions. Truth be told, we are different, so, you can’t just pick one weight loss diet randomly, a decision needs to be made based on what suits you, rather than what’s trending.
A combination of a Keto diet and Intermittent fasting helps one to reach Ketosis faster as compared to using the keto diet alone. It may also result in greater fat loss. Your body adapts to using fat for energy when you change to the keto diet.
During your daily fasts, the fat-adaptation comes in handy since it keeps you active with steady energy. This diet curbs cravings by reducing hunger hormones like ghrelin and neuropeptide and one can go for 23 hours without food.
We recommend that you begin with keto, especially for the newbies, then after a month when your body has adjusted well and is stable, make a switch and shift to intermittent fasting. This will prevent you from feeling tired which happens a lot in the case of intermittent fasting.
Some people should avoid this combination since it’s not good for them and it is not necessary to mix both. In terms of their effectiveness.
Intermittent fasting in the long term is more effective than the Keto diet. It has fewer dogmatic rules and is more durable than keto. It also improves hunger tolerance and helps you get more comfortable with eating less food. Nevertheless, both diets are effective in weight loss but difficult to sustainable individually in the long run. Therefore, to achieve maximum weight loss, you have to combine both of them.
CAN I DO OMAD WITH CARBS?
You can consume Carbs with OMAD. Carbs will help you reduce stress and numb your cravings. Regardless of what you consume, one meal a day will definitely put you in a caloric deficit state. In period of 24 hours, you should eat at least 50g – 100g of carbs on OMAD to maintain your energy levels and prevent food psychological cravings.
CAN YOU DO OMAD WITHOUT KETO?
OMAD works without keto. OMAD is a form of intermittent fasting which helps lower the number of calories in food. Thus, even without Keto, a caloric deficit is achieved which leads to weight loss.
When you eat less food, 12 hours after the last meal you took, you develop a negative energy balance.This will lower the liver glycogen stores, therefore, starting the process of mobilizing fat through fatty acid oxidation.
ketone bodies are then produced by your liver and used for energy. Basically, your body shifts from utilizing an external source of energy (food you eat) to an internal source of energy (stored body fat), and this happens with or without being on keto.
HOW TO FIGHT HUNGER DURING OMAD?
Being hungry while on OMAD only occurs because most people don’t understand the difference between physical and emotional hunger. People who use food to accommodate their emotions may feel very uncomfortable when they reduce the number of meals to one meal a day.
It is normal to feel hungry during OMAD, this is because you are used to consuming meals frequently. However, there are many ways to stop feeling hungry while on OMAD,
they include:
–Recognize which hunger you feelign: This will help settle on the kind of action you need to take. If you’re dealing with emotional hunger, you feel bored and angry, and want to eat, solve that by meditation, reading books, exercising, engage in hobbies and social interactions.
–Choose protein-rich food: Consuming proteins on OMAD helps reduce hunger because of protein-induced satiety. Loss of appetite is achieved by elevated levels of amino acid concentration, meaning, you remain fuller for longer when you are not eating anything.
– Use of green tea extract: It helps not to feel hungry on OMAD because when taken together with meals, it reduces satiety. This is because; green tea has bioactive phytochemicals that help to suppress appetite which in turn helps reduce food cravings, especially at the beginning of the OMAD. Herbal compounds extracted from green tea are helpful in inducing satiety, increasing thermogenesis, and stimulating ghrelin. All of those effects lead to lower food cravings.
-Exercise daily: Exercise impact the control of appetite. Any form of exercise facilitates a short-term energy deficit and appetite-related hormone responses, which leads to greater satiety.
–Drink coffee: The presence of caffeine in coffee and its impact on gastric emptying and appetite hormones aids in stopping hunger pangs.
–Get some chewing gum: Sweetened chewing gum helps lower the hunger on OMAD because it increases your energy expenditure and significantly suppresses cravings for snacks.
–Eat when physically hungry: While consuming one meal per day, be able to differentiate between physical and emotional hunger. This will enable you to know if you’re really hungry or if it is something else.
SUMMARY
When you look at the Keto and OMAD diets, both have something in common. They all work if done correctly over a long period of time and consistently. Therefore, rather than looking at what diet is best, focus on what they have in common since they all work best by caloric restriction.
OMAD can work perfectly fine with Keto. As discussed earlier, it gives you the flexibility and freedom to eat all your meals for the day in one go.
However, if you are pregnant, have a health condition, or are breastfeeding, it’s best to consult your physician on OMAD and Keto before practicing them.
Related Post: Does OMAD work for everyone?
If you’re a complete newbie to fasting, it is strongly recommended that before trying OMAD, start with other easiest types of intermittent fasting.
The ketogenic diet, helps you lose more weight compared to a low-fat diet with much less hunger. Also, it provides many health benefits, especially for metabolic, neurological, or insulin-related diseases. Some of the foods recommended for the Keto diet include; meat, fish, eggs, butter, nuts, healthy oils, avocados, and plenty of low-carb veggies.
Also, there is no need to deprive yourself of eating carbs when you’re doing OMAD. Taking carbs with your meal will not only ease your cravings but will also reduce any form of stress. It doesn’t matter how you cut it. If you just take one meal a day, you will automatically lose weight. There is no either magician or secret sauce in it. If you’re doing OMAD and not losing weight as you anticipated, most probably, it’s not due to carbs.
So, you will definitely be able to lose some weight regardless of which diet you follow. Henceforth, eating slowly, eating when you are physically hungry, drinking coffee, chewing gum, using green tea extract, not eating when satisfied, using protein-rich foods, and daily exercises will give you the skills to not be hungry, lose weight, and maintain your results, irrespective of the diet you are on.
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